Doom II XBLA Now Released!

[Quasar]

Bozzy said:

I bought doom 2 on XBLA last night and have been playing it through on UV, the music is slower but the gameplay is EXACTLY the same its a perfect port, for you guys who like a challenge you will love it, having played UV doom 2 on pc multiple times i can safely say it is ALOT harder on 360 but not too hard. alot more monsters and tougher ones. the port is perfect in my eyes, same speed, more difficult.

Well perfect excluding 1 thing. DAMN 4:3 RESOLUTION, my widescreen tv has to suffer with big black spaces to the sides.

p.s. i havent touched the new episode yet as im playing it from beginning to end on UV so i cant comment on it.

my verdict 9/10 for port 100% worth buying. the 1 mark was lost due to 4:3 resolution fail.


EDIT: to Ragnor my HDTV playing it its actually brighter than on my pc and much more visible so looks like your having bad luck with it.

Given the huge amount of work required to add different aspect ratios into the Doom renderer (it's a lot more than you probably think), I can fully understand why this was not attempted.

[Super Flip]

Quasar said:

Given the huge amount of work required to add different aspect ratios into the Doom renderer (it's a lot more than you probably think), I can fully understand why this was not attempted.

Using wide-screen ratios on source ports make the arms of the weapon sprites appear severed, so that might be why the option was not added, because the sprites weren't meant for them.

[Nes]

If one more person asks me how to reach the secret level in the new campaign, asks me if I could help with the 100 frag achievements, or ask for my account to download doom2, I'm going to chop down a large tree with my bare fists.

Fuck being #2 on the leaderboards.

[Scuba Steve]

Hay, NES, can you help me get the 100 frag achievement?

[SteelPH]

How I secret level in new campaign? :P

[40oz]

chungy said:

I played this mostly in co-op, found some random bugs (including one that was in the Xbox Doom 3 disc too...), but it's all fairly minor and it was awesome :D

like what

[General Rainbow Bacon]

Hey guys,

I found this on the doom wiki. It explains how to port "No Rest For the Living" to PC.

http://doom.wikia.com/wiki/No_Rest_for_the_Living

[Super Flip]

DoomHero85 said:

Hey guys,

I found this on the doom wiki. It explains how to port "No Rest For the Living" to PC.

http://doom.wikia.com/wiki/No_Rest_for_the_Living

Is porting it to PC even legal?

[GooberMan]

Bozzy said:

the music is slower but the gameplay is EXACTLY the same its a perfect port

There's actually something that's been bugging me, and I think the slower music may be symptomatic of the fact that it's not a perfect port.

The original Doom had an update loop that triggered 35 times a second. We know that the codebase that the Xbox/360 ports started off with weren't any of the advanced sourceports - we'd have seen a code release by now - which leaves WinDoom or even vanilla Doom as the parent codebase. The chances of decoupling the draw call from the main loop to run in another thread are minimal. There's a lot of work that'll need to be done, and given that the 360 versions strongly resemble the Xbox versions included in Doom 3 I'd suggest that the effort put in to port the codebase to the 360 was spent mostly trying to match Xbox technical requirements and getting the netcode up to snuff.

I've not seen any horizontal tearing in either of the Doom ports, and it's not running at 60FPS either. Thus, the present call to flip the backbuffer is a blocking call, ie the game doesn't continue until the new image is on the screen. This means that it'll be a 720p30 resolution, or NTSC/PAL60 for SD televisions (my HDTV is a bit older these days and doesn't give me exact resolution details).

What all this means is that I suspect the game is running at approximately 86% of its intended speed - or, how it played on your 386 back in the day. I'm considering doing some more stringent tests to test my theories, but if anyone else has already done the work here then I'll just leave it at that.

EDIT: On another note:

Super Flip said:

Is porting it to PC even legal?

This community has been releasing weapon packs and reusing textures from other games for years, and people are worried about moving a file from your Xbox to your PC for personal use? Excuse me while I laugh uncontrollably.

[General Rainbow Bacon]

@Super Flip: I have no idea if it's legal, I didn't write the article. But whoever did, says that the new episode was made as a pwad. So...
do with that information what you will. I, however do not have XBLA so and getting it would be more expensive for me than 9 levels are worth, considering all the free, amazing, pwads I download here. If it is legal though, I wish someone would do it.

EDIT: If it isn't legal to do it the way mentioned in that article. That info on how to do it should be taken down, so stealing the wad isn't so inviting and accessible. Of course, maybe it's legal as long as someone doesn't upload it to the net. I doubt it'll be long before someone does it anyway though.

[wildweasel]

GooberMan said:

This community has been releasing weapon packs and reusing textures from other games for years, and people are worried about moving a file from your Xbox to your PC for personal use? Excuse me while I laugh uncontrollably.

The problem here is, the entire reason anybody in this community would want to buy the 360 version of Doom 2 is to play that episode. To hack it out of the game data so that people could play it for free would be depriving id Software of sales.

[General Rainbow Bacon]

Id didn't make the new episode. But if they want more sales, I'll gladly toss them a few bucks if they could release the new episode at a discount on the pc for people like us that want the new episode and already have a retail copy of doom 2. Since it was originally a pc game anyway.

[GooberMan]

WildWeasel said:

To hack it out of the game data so that people could play it for free would be depriving id Software of sales.

It seems you didn't read the part where I said PERSONAL USE properly. The piraters have been smacked down, and now people are asking whether it's legal to even transfer the files yourself. At least learn to read if you're going to post a counter.

[CODOR]

WildWeasel said:
The problem here is, the entire reason anybody in this community would want to buy the 360 version of Doom 2 is to play that episode. To hack it out of the game data so that people could play it for free would be depriving id Software of sales.

I don't think he was suggesting that people copy it for others, merely that they be able to move the copy they bought for their XBox to their PC (or any other Doom-capable device) for their own enjoyment. (Which sounds perfectly fine to me; it's no different than copying a CD to an MP3 player -- just a format shift.)

DoomHero85 said:
But if they want more sales, I'll gladly toss them a few bucks if they could release the new episode at a discount on the pc for people like us that want the new episode and already have a retail copy of doom 2.

Same here, I'd pay at least $10 for the PWAD alone (seems that's the cost of the whole game on XBLA)...

[wildweasel]

GooberMan said:

It seems you didn't read the part where I said PERSONAL USE properly. The piraters have been smacked down, and now people are asking whether it's legal to even transfer the files yourself. At least learn to read if you're going to post a counter.

The further problem is, as I've researched myself, you don't need to have even purchased the game to perform said extraction.

[GooberMan]

WildWeasel said:

The further problem is, as I've researched myself, you don't need to have even purchased the game to perform said extraction.

Well then, I'm laughing even harder if you can extract it from the demo of the game. It does make perfect sense, the trial of the game is simply everything but with some code locks.

It's a legal grey area. You're using data that you've been provided. Purchasing a license allows you to access the data from that specific console or account, but as Microsoft has made it possible to put that data on a memory stick it allows access elsewhere implicitly.

They might try a DCMA notice on anyone publishing steps on how to access this data if it's actually that big of a profit muncher. Again, it'll come down to the personal use thing I mentioned. They give you the data, you use it yourself and don't distribute it elsewhere.

EDIT: Oookay guys, I'll give a cookie to the first person to run a Doom1 or Doom2 megawad on the 360. It's possible, I tells you! Someone put Freedoom on their memory stick and take a photo.

EDIT 2: I'll try it myself tonight once I'm home from work if no one takes up the challenge.

[cybdmn]

GooberMan said:

There's actually something that's been bugging me, and I think the slower music may be symptomatic of the fact that it's not a perfect port.

No, the slower music have nothing to do with the code. The midis used by this port are slower than the originals are.

[GooberMan]

Aye, I did read that somewhere after my original posting. Determining if the game actually does run slower though is worth investigating.

[hardcore_gamer]

For those who are interested, I have posted a overview/review of the Xbox live Arcade version of Doom 2 on my Youtube channel. I am not sure if this counts as advertising or not, but since it is completely on topic I don't think their is any harm in posting it here.

I apologize for my horrible accent :(

[aleksej]

We must create an online petition that Nerve Software brings this new episode on PC separately.

[GooberMan]

After an hour of prodding and some reverse engineering, I've worked out the disk file format and have extracted every file successuflly.



So the first thing I did, after noticing a discrepancy in filesize between my DOOM2.WAD (which has been patched up to 1.9 from the original 1.666 release) and the Xbox DOOM2.wad, I put it in to ZDoom. First thing I noticed - the titlescreen is gone. Aw.

Still, I did take a couple of screenshots of the medikits in Zdoom for proof.





The metadata.txt you see there seems to indicate that there's a spelling error for MAP32. It's called "Gros" in that file. Anyone gotten to MAP32 on the Xbox to confirm this?

Getting a PWAD back on to the Xbox from here in will be trickier. I effectively have to recreate a signed package and transfer that back to the Xbox.

EDIT: ...and the way to do that seems to be to pirate the package creation tool. That's me done then. I'm not going anywhere near that.

[General Rainbow Bacon]

It probably isn't possible, but I think releasing some of the more insanely hard maps here on doomworld on xbox would be funny. Let's see someone beat HR map 24 with a controller, lolz.

[Gez]

GooberMan said:

So the first thing I did, after noticing a discrepancy in filesize between my DOOM2.WAD (which has been patched up to 1.9 from the original 1.666 release) and the Xbox DOOM2.wad

That's because they've used the original Xbox IWAD, rather than the PC IWAD. If you look at its content with a lump editor, you'll notice that MAP02 is put at the very end, rather than in sequence, and that there's a MAP33 as well, complete with a CWILV32 graphic.

However, because they did not use the code of the original Xbox port for the Xbox 360 port, the easter egg secret exit in MAP02 does not work.

[NeoWorm]

That medikit edit is afwully ugly.

[40oz]

aleksej said:

We must create an online petition that Nerve Software brings this new episode on PC separately.

I think so too. Even if we have to pay for it. I feel bad for having played it and liking it a lot and not being able to throw any money their way. They obviously worked hard in these maps. They're detailed, the gameplay is really balanced, and I enjoyed it all from start to finish. I want to compensate them but that would mean I would have to repair my xbox, renew my subscription to xbox live, get microsoft points, THEN get the game. There's too many middlemen I have to go through to get this.

[kristus]

NeoWorm said:

That medikit edit is afwully ugly.

They were legally obligated to change it.

[GooberMan]

40oz said:

I want to compensate them but that would mean I would have to repair my xbox, renew my subscription to xbox live, get microsoft points, THEN get the game. There's too many middlemen I have to go through to get this.

Mostly incorrect.

You can purchase the game online from the Xbox website using your Silver Xbox Live account. MS Points are sold in 800 point lots these days if you're American, so you don't even have to worry about buying 200 too many points. The only part that's accurate is that you will need your Xbox to download it.

[Woolie Wool]

kristus said:

They were legally obligated to change it.

Didn't the International Red Cross get pissed at them for using their symbol in a violent video game?

[Maes]

Woolie Wool said:

Didn't the International Red Cross get pissed at them for using their symbol in a violent video game?

Or Muslim/Christian associations got offended by it, each for their own reasons. It's not the first time I've seen crosses being replaced with other symbols in videogames.

[hardcore_gamer]

Maes said:

Or Muslim/Christian associations got offended by it, each for their own reasons. It's not the first time I've seen crosses being replaced with other symbols in videogames.

But what does it matter?

I never found my self carrying at all about how the medkits looked like just so long as they prevented me from dieing.